Previous to its fall in 1804, the commander of the Ping troops, which included the joint forces of Zimmé, Lakon, Nan, and Pheh, secretly informed the chief of Kiang Hsen that they had only come to accede to his former proposal, and merely wished Kiang Hsen to throw off the Burmese yoke and become feudatory to Siam, as the Ping Shans had already done; and he promised that, if the inhabitants of Kiang Hsen would massacre the Burmese governor and his troops and open the gates, the Ping Shans would form a defensive and offensive alliance with them. The inhabitants of Kiang Hsen accordingly slew the Burmese governor and the 300 Burmese soldiers who were within the walls, and opened the gates to the Ping Shans. They soon found to their cost that they had been treacherously dealt with. The city was destroyed; some of the people escaped across the Salween and settled in Mokmai and Monay, and the rest were taken captive to the Ping States, and distributed amongst them. With the Shans treachery is an ordinary occurrence in warfare: the persons deluded are ashamed at having been taken in; the successful party chuckles and crows over his cleverness. From the time when Kiang Hsen was captured till 1810, Ping Shan armies frequently raided into the Burmese Shan States—proceeding as far west as the Salween, and as far north as the border of China—sacked the towns, and carried away the inhabitants into captivity. The late General M‘Leod, when at Zimmé in 1837, states in his journal that “the greater part of the inhabitants of Zimmé are people from Kiang Tung, Muang Niong (Yong), Kiang Then (Tsen or Hsen), and many other places to the northward. They were originally subjects of Ava (Burmah).” In another passage he says: “They, with the Talaings (Peguan Burmese), comprise more than two-thirds of the population of the country.” The Chow Hluang told me that before he left Lapoon to take up the government of Kiang Hsen, when it was reoccupied in 1881, his retainers numbered fully 30,000 souls, amongst whom were 2500 fighting-men. Every man from eighteen to seventy years of age, who is not a slave, is reckoned as a fighting man; and allowing one grown man to every five souls, there must have been fully 6000 grown men amongst his dependants. This proportion between full-grown slaves and fighting-men shows that there were about 17,500 slaves amongst his 30,000 retainers. The descendants of Burmese refugees and captives in war are classed as slaves by the Siamese and the Ping Shans, and are parcelled out amongst the ruling classes. His statement must be taken with a grain or two of salt, as the chiefs are apt to give Falstaffian accounts of the numbers of their retainers. [Illustration: _A Shan house in Kiang Hsen._ ]